Global Briefing, April 28, 2011: Saints and Sinners

Have Oil, Will Fight — The West is considering blocking all oil trade with Libya. That’s ill-advised, argues Vivienne Walt. By tapping into the country’s own vast supplies, Gaddafi could keep his army fighting for a while.

Post-Racial — David Remnick calls out Donald Trump and his fellow ‘birthers’ in an essay for the New Yorker. He calls Trump “an irrepressible jackass who thinks of himself as a sly fox” and blasts the movement for “race-baiting” and “fear-mongering.”

Tibetan Transition — The director of Columbia’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program tells TIME’s Ishaan Tharoor what to expect from the Dalai Lama’s political successor.

Old Wounds — The UN’s ‘winner takes all’ approach to the Ivory Coast may have reignited the North-South civil war instead of healing it, writes Mahmood Mamdani for Al Jazeera.

Speedy Sainthood — Beatification usually takes about a decade, but the process has been shortened for Pope Jonh Paul. Stephan Faris explains why some people aren’t pleased.

Guantanamo Files — Spiegel Online highlights the “absurd” case of Murat Kurnaz, a German man held at Guantanamo for five years.

Petraeus and Panetta —Spencer Ackerman of Wired‘s Danger Room offered this take on the announcement: “It’s a good day to be an armed Predator drone or a shadow warrior.”

In Pictures — Light Box features the work of Canadian photographer Devin Tepleski, whose latest project looks at people displaced by the damming of Ghana’s Black Volta river.